The ISL 2007 English Speech Transcription System for European Parliament Speeches

The project Technology and Corpora for Speech to Speech Translation (TC-STAR) aims at making a break-through in speech-to-speech translation research, significantly reducing the gap between the performance of machines and humans at this task. Technological and scientific progress is driven by periodic, competitive evaluations within the project. In this paper we describe the ISL speech transcription system for English European Parliament speeches with which we participated in the third TC-STAR evaluation campaing in the spring of 2007. The improvements over last year’s system originate from a recognition hypotheses based segmentation, the utilization of unsupervised in-domain training material, a modified cross-system adaptation and combination scheme, and the enhancement of the language model through the use of web based training material.